A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words
for release 02-07-06
Washington D.C.
The Poet's Eye watches in amazement as violent protests erupt across the Muslim world over the Danish publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed in a less than flattering way.
From Tehran to Afghanistan to Lebanon to Somalia . Syria, Indonesia, Thailand, there has been an outpouring of rage against Denmark for having a free press. Embassies have been burned. And this is all over some cartoons? Don't believe it. It's about religion.
I don't mean to suggest that literature, even popular literature like cartoons, doesn't sometimes have a profound effect on political events. Uncle Tom's Cabin comes to mind and Mein Kampf and the cartoons of Thomas Nast. Events in the news also can have a galvanizing effect. I'm thinking of the sinkings of the Lusitania and the Maine as being the fuses that lit the powder-keg of war.
God knows, we Americans are idolators. Why do you think the most popular television show on the air is called American Idol? The Muslim religion forbids idolatry. Check out Muslim art and architecture. There are no depictions of the human form. There are no gargoyles on their temples and no pictures of Mohammed on the walls of their mosques. That would be idolatry. So, the representation of the Prophet Mohammed in cartoon would be understandably insulting to the observant Muslim.
Ok, let's turn it around. Suppose that Al Jazeera broadcast a mini-series about Jesus having illicit anal sex with Mary Magdalene or, god forbid, with Judas Iscariot. Let's get Mel Gibson to direct it. This might upset some Christians, especially those at the lower end of the intelligence scale, but I doubt if the Christian factions, whether they be Catholic or Baptist, would assault the Qatar Embassy in Washington with fire bombs. Maybe Muslims are being a bit thin-skinned on this cartoon issue. Or perhaps there are other more explosive issues that underlie this fuse of a cartoon.
If I were a Muslim, I would be more upset that America has military bases and economic interests in my holy land and that America is a supporter of Israel, which is viewed in the Arab world as a usurper nation which has subjugated the Palestinian people, than I would be about a cartoon published in a Scandinavian newspaper four months ago. Maybe what we are observing is a case of transference.
It wasn't really the Lusitania incident that got us into WWI. It wasn't really the Maine incident that got us into the Spanish American War. It wasn't the Gulf of Tonkin incident that got us into the Vietnam War. It wasn't even the attack on Pearl Harbor that got us into WWII or the attack on the Trade Towers that got us into the so-called War on Terror. In all these cases there was a substrate of political agenda and financial interests and public sentiment forming a dry tinderbox just waiting for the spark of ignition.
Humans have a history of going to war for some pretty silly reasons. There was a war in Russia in which thousands of people died. The war was started by a religious dispute over whether it was proper to cross yourself with two or three fingers. Another mythical war (besides the war on terror,) The Trojan War, was a dispute over a woman. But reasons for war are often composed after the wars themselves are over. They are much like cartoons, caricatures of past events, excuses more than causes.
"Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."
--W. R. Hearst writing to illustrator Frederic Remington, 1898
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